Brandon was born in a valley in southern California. Since then, poems
and pictures have appeared in Word for/Word, Barrow Street,
Unpleasant Event Schedule, Spinning Jenny, New Orleans
Review, No Tell Motel, andelsewhere, as well as in galleries in
Vermont, Connecticut and New York. He is one half of The Pines, a
collaboration with Phil Cordelli (thepines.blogspot.com). He lives
in a valley in western Montana.

Lake the Pellucid

The photo instructor is dead. He paired
three too many things, and turned away
from all three,
ashamed. He did not know their source.

There was no need to carry them through,
he thought, supine. His family played him out
at the wake. His prints were left
drying from the slack festoon.

Animals sat themselves numb in their cages.
The county had a time of it, constructing
a light rail transit system through the arm
of the ambones. Bamboo bridges spanning

a thin, reflecting stream,
gathered the trumpeting, yellow slugs
into their interlocks. I'll climb down into you, fool,
not least within your tangle, Sleepy Eye.

A: A row of egg-white, vinyl-sided condominiums.

A: Three men walking down a path in the Pine Barrens, two burlap sacks filled with egg-white stones between them.

A: A canal beside a churchyard, black water.

Q: Hey there, boy! The lights have come on. How many are there?

Lake in Spite of You

What did we learn? What were we in the middle of
when the kingly disappeared
into the thermocline?

A girl-leg emerged severed
from the stillwater, bobbing along
the rod-pollen, by the gray-mantle.

Green of the water v. limestone embellishing.
A troubled voice graded the rock bowl.
A meal of pipple-popple. A nougat.

Lake to Bend Down

We were not innocent of anything. We stood
before our peers, and admitted it all. We grew

tired of revealing ourselves, refused to turn again
and be forgiven. Those loveless, staring

misconstrued our inhesitance as acceptance. We stood erect
in the basement, before the dishes of cheese-stuffed zucchini

and bacon-wrapped chicken (chicken stuffed with cream cheese,
chicken hocked for losing in the burnt and flattened grass

outside, away from all the lamest loot besides,
you irreparably dandy jerk, c'mon.)

We crept to the edge of the sanctuary,
and peered into the jest, brown spume.

The clothed mummies. They were our leaving there.
The chucks fell into the roses. You were at the christening

of the new congregation. The family was there; they all smelled
terribly porcine. There were photos of the pastor

in his "athletic" years. His face was unchangeably
long. It was hung from the east - that was your single summation.

Lake the Pellucid (Reprise)

What a hundred chromo.

Lake Effects, Lake Solutions

1. The gates beneath which you pass to wish the murderers hell black

2. Blooms of vetch caught in their trailing nets across planes of sand and stem violet